German woman killed 5 of her own children shortly after birth, police say

HUSUM, Germany, September 27, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – German officials have charged a woman with murdering five of her own children shortly after they were born to preserve her family’s standard of living.

The 28-year-old woman, whose name has not been released, gave birth to two children, ages 8 and 10, but then allegedly began hiding her subsequent pregnancies from everyone, including her husband.

She dumped the first two babies’ bodies in public, leaving one along a roadside nine miles outside her hometown of Husum, a coastal town near Germany’s border with Denmark. After police realized the babies had the same DNA, she delivered her next three babies in the woods – but in macabre fashion disposed of their bodies in boxes in the basement of her apartment building. Police arrested her on five charges of manslaughter.

The case’s prosecutor, Ulrike Stahlmann-Liebelt, said the woman made a “comprehensive confession” after submitting to a DNA test.

“She has said that the family lived at a certain level of prosperity, that it was clear her husband did not want any more children, and that one reason was to preserve this standard, and she feared that might be endangered if another child were there,” she said.

“This is a truly horrifying series of events that shows how sick the culture of death is,” Arland Nichols, director of education and evangelization at Human Life International, told LifeSiteNews.com via e-mail. “This mother has taken the life of her newly born so that her husband might live as he wished.”

Although abortion is widely available in Germany, officials have not said the woman made any attempt to procure abortions and apparently had no accomplices in her five acts of infanticide.

“Our assessment is that no one else was involved and it is apparently the case, incredible as it might seem, that no one noticed the pregnancies or the birth of these children,” said police official Dirk Czarnetzki.

“I recall the recent article by Giubilini and Minerva that argued for ‘after birth abortion’ based upon societal acceptance of abortion. They, like Peter Singer, argued that infanticide is okay based upon the ‘logic of abortion,’” Nichols said.

“What’s the moral difference between killing the baby in the womb and killing the baby just born? There is no moral difference,” he said. “Both acts are murder and thus intrinsically evil.”

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